Summary
The article “The Language that Gets People to Give: Phrases that Predict Success on Kickstarter” is about a crowdfunding site “Kickstarter”, and the factors that lead to success on the site. The paper begins with a description of how crowdfunding websites are becoming increasingly popular, It is argued that the specific language used generates roughly around 58% of success funding the project. Research to test this theory was done on a corpus of 45K Kickstarter projects analyzing duration, project goal amount, presence of a video, and language. Out of 9 million phrases, 20,000 phrases were studied and analyzed. It is believed that knowing these specific phrases can help sites improve in the future. Six categories were developed to understand the effects of persuasion on users. Reciprocity argues that people tend to return a favor after receiving one. Scarcity means people attach more value to products if they are hard to come by. Social proof is people tend to rely on others to decide how to act, while social identity is a person’s knowledge that he or she belongs to a social group. This social group is usually established among individuals with common interests or beliefs. Liking is the idea that people are more likely to comply with another person if they like them. Lastly, authority argues that people often resort to expert opinions for making decisions. Other characteristics that have an effect on the success of the funding are social progress, emotion, cogitative thinking, personal concerns and perception rates. All of these ideas go into how a product sells, and whether or not people will invest in them.
Reflection
After reading this article, I am more aware of how our language changes people’s perceptions about products. It is very powerful and can make or break a project. Personally I had never heard of the website Kickstarter before, but am intrigued to look into donating through the site. The idea that different phrases effect the way people react to products is extraordinary. It makes me think about previous products that I have purchased, and whether or not these persuasion techniques were used on me. Although, there were many words that were tagged as negative predictors that did not come across to me that way. Phrases such as “new form of”, “information at”, and “models of” are words I personally would have used in a Kickstarter post. It would be interesting to see how many Kickstarter users actually research the phrases that they use in their posts, whether it be related to reciprocity, scarcity or authority. I think the idea of reciprocity is a large contributing factor to whether or not people donate to the project. Most people I know will only contribute to something if they are going to get something in return. If users are persuaded into believing this product is something that will benefit them, then they are more likely to volunteer. I think that if more inventors and entrepreneurs knew about this type of research, they would be much more successful raising money.
Questions
Can this research be applied to other types of websites? (Social media, news articles, blogs, etc.)
What websites already apply this type of work?
What percentage of people posting on Kickstarter actually research their vocabulary before posting?
How does Kickstarter’s competition differ?
Is Kickstarter failing in any aspect that others are succeeding on? Does this have to do with user’s language?
